Sunday, January 29, 2017

take that and eat it

To kneel and pray in this sate is almost physically painful. At best, it's like talking into a bucket. At worst, you feel like a chump, some heartsick fool still pasting up valentines for a long-gone cad.
--Mary Karr, "Facing Altars'

In the sun-soaked wooden ordinary chapel, it seems hard to believe that this is all quite real. The rainbow prisms of light refracted from the stained glass windows dance across the warm wood floor--are we not just these?--prisms of light that dance for a while here on the floor, and then fade as the dance disappears in the shadows of sunset.

I think my mind is pushing too much to the boundaries of the world. The world feels like an elastic cage, which can only bear so much expansion before it snaps. Do my fellow mass-goers in the chapel feel this dread?--the dread of being just a puff of light on an unknown floor, which can be snapped, blown away, flicked into oblivion with nary a finger. Or do they keep their minds in check and keep the horror and the angst at bay? Are all our minds careening towards the outer limits of our worlds, flinging themselves towards the cosmos' peripheries as quickly as they expand, reaching to the fringe, where all that reality fades into empty void?

It is quite difficult to make peace with reality, particularly when there exists this sun-soaked world of eschatos in the midst of war and suffering. Which one is real? How can both be?

My mind is spinning into dark inside my body of prismatic light. What are the visions of our eyes but so many molecules, light, shadow, movement, deceptive in its stillness? What are our memories but records of these pathetically piecemeal past impressions? None can be trusted.

The anchor in this world of dark seems to be the Eschatos Himself, hanging, dark wooden corpse in the midst of this light chapel. He seems quite real. But is He? I see myself, a small, quivering beam of light clinging to that dark wood, praying He is the one solid anchor in a world of fleeting forms.

This is not Chinatown— and I am not drinking whiskey— this is a leftover white wine in Harlem sort of night. I call my mother, crying,...

About me

"I never want to lose the story-loving child within me, or the adolescent, or the young woman, or the middle-aged one, because all together they help me to be fully alive on this journey, and show me that I must be willing to go where it takes me, even through the valley of the shadow."--Madeleine L'Engle